Comedians Are Catching On

Comedians Are Catching On

Jimmy Kimmel speaks at a ceremony for singer Lionel Richie at the TCL Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, Calif., March 7, 2018. (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)Their strong liberal slant may end up helping conservatives.

The comedians are beginning to catch on.

Over the weekend — just one week after featuring a bevy of top-line Hollywood stars impersonating members of the Trump administration, as well as a cameo by a vengeful Stormy Daniels asking for President Trump’s resignation — Saturday Night Live finally acknowledged that they may have gone overboard. Cast members of SNL showed up at the beginning of the Mother’s Day episode with their actual mothers, several of whom chided them on their myopic focus on Trump. Chris Redd’s mother said, “I don’t understand why everyone focuses on Trump when you should be focusing on Jesus.” Mikey Day’s mother likened the witch hunt in The Crucible to the witch hunt of Trump. Luke Nell’s mom exclaimed, “Enough with the Trump jokes!” She added, “Why doesn’t SNL talk about Crooked Hillary?!” Kyle Mooney’s mother and Colin Jost’s mother complained in similar fashion.

Well, yes.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Meanwhile, comedy pope Jimmy Kimmel appeared at the upfronts, where he explained, “I think people have had an ass-full of Donald Trump, and I feel like the upfront is a time to look within and make fun of ourselves.”

Advertisement

This is a problem for Republicans.

My mentor, Andrew Breitbart, was fond of pointing out that culture was upstream of politics. But so is counterculture. And as Hollywood and the media have come to be dominated in extraordinary fashion by the Left, the counterculture has risen: cynical about the entertainment industry, annoyed by their constant pandering, irritated by their snide self-assurance. It’s not that the Right has created a cultural milieu that can counter the power of the Left — it’s that the Right has responded to the Left by channeling their lack of a cultural outlet into politics. Conservatives didn’t respond to Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert by creating a conservative version of Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert. They responded by electing Donald Trump, a Republican Congress, a Republican Senate, Republican governors, and Republican statehouses.

This has created a truly bizarre situation that feeds the polarization in our politics: Never has the hegemonic dominance of the Left been quite so strong in the cultural arena, and rarely has the hegemonic dominance of the Right been quite so strong in the political arena. And this polarization is self-enforcing: The cultural arbiters are so angry with the rise of conservative politicians that they’ve doubled down on their rage and extremism. Instead of reaching out to the other side, they’ve declared the other side evil, untouchable, foolish.

Even the kindest comedians of the Left — relatively harmless funnymen like John Mulaney — can’t help but ding Trump’s constituents. In his latest Netflix special, Mulaney begins by noting, “It seems like everyone, everywhere, is super mad about everything.” He then softly mocks Trump as a “horse in a hospital”: a bizarre and uncontrollable force in a normally staid and well-organized environment. So far, so good. But he can’t help himself. He adds:

Sometimes, if you make fun of the horse, people will get upset. These are the people that opened the door for the horse. And I don’t judge anyone, but sometimes I ask people, I go, “Hey, how come you opened the door for the horse? “And they go, “Well, the hospital was inefficient!” Or sometimes they go, “If you’re so mad at the horse, how come you weren’t mad when the last guy did this three and half years ago?” . . . I used to pay less attention before it was a horse. Also, I thought the last guy was pretty smart, and he seemed pretty good at his job. . . . I don’t check up on people when they seem okay at their job. You may think that’s an ignorant answer, but it’s not, it’s a great answer.

It’s not a great answer. It’s just an answer that provides a window into the confirmation bias of those on the left, who could not understand why anyone on the right might have thought that Barack Obama was, in fact, a snake loose in a hospital. If you’re on the right watching this routine — enjoying the rest of Mulaney’s rants, which are extraordinarily good — it’s likely to make you think, “Hey, screw that guy. I’ll go give $10 to Trump’s reelection effort just to keep self-righteously ignorant entertainers from picking who governs the country.”

So, in a way, the worst thing that could happen for Republicans is for the cultural Left to call for peace.

Thankfully, there’s not much risk of that. The same weekend that Kimmel and the cast of SNL signaled that they might be waking up to their own pernicious effect on the political climate, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah appeared on CNN — yes, CNN — to explain that Trump was like an “African dictator.”

Advertisement

And so the chasm between culture and politics grows ever wider. Polarization grows stronger. And that’s no joke.

Recommended Articles

Most Popular

If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if ...
Read More

A number of liberal bastions are daily being hammered — especially the elite university and Silicon Valley.
A Yale and a Stanford, or Facebook and Google, assume — for the most part rightly — that each is so loudly progressive that the public, federal and state regulators, and politicians would of ...
Read More

Over the weekend, my colleague Kevin Williamson wrote an outstanding piece illuminating the ideology and opportunism behind a Connecticut Supreme Court opinion holding that the manufacturer of the semi-automatic rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting may be held liable for violating state unfair-trade-practices ...
Read More

Rickey I. Kanter pleaded guilty to one count of federal mail fraud for falsely representing that his company’s therapeutic shoe inserts were Medicare-approved and for billing Medicare on that basis. Both federal law and Wisconsin law bar a convicted felon from possessing a firearm.
On Friday, a Seventh ...
Read More

Few things can more quickly remind you of the vast cultural divides -- even between middle-class and upper-middle-class -- than a juicy Ivy League admissions scandal. It's the talk of the coastal parenting class, and it barely penetrates the conversation down here in Tennessee -- except as a curiosity. “Aunt ...
Read More

Last October, Sarah Lawrence College professor Samuel Abrams wrote an important and insightful essay in the New York Times. While critics of higher education have often focused on faculty bias -- in part because a small subset of professors is prone to say ridiculous things -- a larger problem has gone mostly ...
Read More